SEEKING RAPTURE: Scenes From A Life

In this exquisite book of personal reflections on a womanÆs life as child, wife, and mother, Kathryn Harrison, ôa writer of extraordinary giftsö (Tobias Wolff), re-creates episodes in her life, exploring how experiences of childhood recur in memory, to be transformed and sometimes healed in the lives we lead as adults. At the heart ofSeekingRaptureis the notion that a womanÆs life is a continuous process of transformation, an ongoing overcoming and re-creating of self. Standing in her childrenÆs bedroom, Harrison asks, ôHow did it happen that I got from there to here?ö The bestselling author ofTheKissandTheSealWifewrites with honesty and grace of how her early longing for the mother who abandoned her led to a pattern of self-destructive behavior, from shoplifting to bulimia, and to yearning for ways to transcend and even erase her physical self, to become the perfect child her mother could love. As a woman, she writes of time, the relentless passage experienced by adults, in contrast to the languors of childhood, and she recalls with vividness and humor her grandmotherÆs attempts in her eighties to cheat on a driving test. And as a daughter, she writes of caring for her ailing mother, hoping for closure that does not come, but which she creates on her own terms. ôThis is a writer at the top of her form, entirely the master of her material,ö said Mary Gordon aboutTheKiss, and the same can be said aboutSeekingRapture, a book that is by turns startling, moving, insightful, and always resonant and true.